Date:  Tue, 28 Oct 1997 20:31:12 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <199710290131.UAA24585@locke.ccil.org>
Reply-To: Geoffrey Hacker <c9709244@alinga.newcastle.edu.au>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Geoffrey Hacker <c9709244@alinga.newcastle.edu.au>
Subject:      Re: Dvorak (& Lojban)
To:         bob@rattlesnake.com
Cc:         lojban@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU
In-Reply-To:  <m0xQD1D-000HyRC@rattlesnake.com>
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> >     .i lo mi ke xekri bunre mlatu zu'a vu pu'o kalte le cmacu
>
>    Looking at your above sentence, and before reading your English
>    translation, I would simply have said, "Far to the left of me, a
>    dark brown cat of mine is about to [hunt] the mouse." That's not
>    difficult to say and I could have sworn it conveyed all the
>    *relevant* information.
>
> Not difficult to say, but that is not what I understand the Lojban to
> say, particularly not what I understand it to say before I filled in
> the context.
>
> My understanding of {pu'o} is that
>
>   * it does not tell how far to the pastward of the event we
>     referring; and
>
>   * it does not tell when the event is taking place.
>
>    (Chapter 10.10,  _The Complete Lojban Language_)
>
> After reading my statement of context it is fair for you to think the
> time is "now": `I only have one black/brown cat, I am looking out my
> window on my left into the field'.  This context suggests {ca pu'o};
> but before I specified such a context, a listener should figure I
> may be referring to the past, present, or future;

I have hitherto not really seen any Lojbanist use an event contour without
a tense cmavo unless the tense was either clearly established from context
first or the tense was the present - and that's exactly what you did just
now. :) Your tense, unspecified, DID turn out to be the present.
Therefore, it still DOES seem to have been a reasonable assumption that
the tense was present. And even if it wasn't, English still forces a
choice about tense, but the present tense has always been used as a kind
of "timeless" default when you're not too sure what the tense really is,
or a reference to position in time would be meaningless. For example,
summaries of books usually use the present tense to describe the plot of
the book unfolding.

> and the cat may be a
> kitten crouching before a ball of yarn.

Now this WOULD be genuinely confusing. Why on earth would you refer to a
ball of yarn as a mouse without first warning your listener when the
context was not clear? If, on the other hand, you were genuinely confused
by whether you were looking at a mouse, you would have made a special
point of it, again so as not to be confusing. Or, if you were confident
that it was a mouse, but wanted to allow the possibility that it was
something else, you could either make a special point of it or not as the
case may be. But it is always understood that you could be honestly
mistaken about one of your claims anyway. As far as whether the cat is a
kitten, a kitten is a kind of cat - a baby cat - even though it's not
normally idiomatic to talk about it like that. Nevertheless, where the
context does not specify otherwise, it seems reasonable simply to call "lo
mlatu" a cat.
 >
> Indeed, one might wonder whether it is a Sapir-Whorfian effect of your
> English that caused you to presume that {pu'o} implies {ca pu'o}; or
> is it that regardless of language, we presume a context to be current
> and local unless told otherwise?  (I can imagine strong practical
> arguments for the latter.)

I can assure you, it has always been the latter.
>
> (Incidentally, insufficient specificity is why I left the designatee
> of {lo} unspecified until I set the context; after setting the
> context, the universe of discourse contained only one veridical {lo mi
> ke xekri bunre mlatu}.  Needless to say, if by default we presume a
> context to be current and local, then I could have presumed you knew
> that our universe of discourse contained only one veridical cat.)

That's hardly how the default contexts work. Most Lojbanists do seem to
interpet contexts for space and time as being fairly immediate unless told
otherwise, and the context of "lo" to be as broad as possible to allow for
REASONABLE non-specificity. I hardly think it makes sense to arbitrarily
violate these conventions because of loopholes in the grammar.

Geoff